There is good logic there. If your competitor is there influencing people, you should really be making sure those people are hearing the full story, not just one side.Personally I think lobbying should be banned, and DC should be salaried. However until that day never happens, you have to play the game to get the most success.

While 99% of people may agree with you (myself included,) the 1% are having their pockets lined with this money or are writing the checks out of their success.Why would those 1% support changing a law that is paying for their mansions? Good luck with that one!

Actually, This is wrong. In the agency model, Amazon, Apple etc. act as an Agent for the publisher, merely selling a book to the public at the price the publisher sets. As an agent Amazon and Apple cannot set the sales price.
This is different from the wholesale model that existed before, where Amazon, B&N, stores, would buy books at a wholesale price and sell to customers at whatever price they wanted to.

Antitrust is about fines. Jail is so very rare, that is not part of a companies concern.
It's about money. Is it cheaper for a company to fight it and potentially tarnish their reputation along the way, or pay up a fine now that will be much cheaper than one a jury would give (but a cost much higher than your lawyer fees in defending you.)

It's always sad when people have to resort to personal attacks rather than actually commenting on the substance at hand.
My original post also used 'see' instead of 'sell', just to add to my list of typos. I've been waiting for that to be pointed out too.

Of course publishers can set their prices to anything. That is normal practice, and typically involves an internal balancing act of rising costs/competitive pricing.
What is illegal is colluding. Which is what the publishers reportedly did. That removes the competitive part of the equation.

Amazon and Apple have both interestingly taken a similar path recently, which the publishers must be somewhat concerned about. That is that both now enable the writers themselves to self-publish through iBooks or the Amazon book store. This should give us more choice as it is easier for a writer to publish.
This has pros and cons to writers and consumers, but a clear looser is the publisher. Perhaps both companies thanks for events that have annoyed or tarnished them.

That was the problem though. By the publishers changing the model to 'set prices for other outlets' (i.e. define the actual selling price), that prevented Amazon from selling below the publishers price. So prices went up.

There are two paths forward there. One, that Amazon gains more than an 80% market share, in which case it is a monopoly itself and would be subject to investigation. Second, that if Amazon were to raise prices, that competition would lower prices and gain back market share.
The Internet has a different model that is much more self-regulating when it comes to pricing due to the simplicity of entering the market space. Trust me, if it was simple to compete with Comcast,...